Hi Mark,
Thanks for your thoughts and I appreciate articulating some of these
concerns. Comments follow...
On May 13, 2004, at 3:09 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
- Open participation and consensus
An Atom Working Group in the W3C could charter itself to operate
in the public, and invite participants who are not from W3C Member
organizations at the chair's prerogative. We recognize that much of
the work done on Atom has been by non-Members, and want to assure
those participants that they may take part fully in a W3C Atom
Working Group.
Generally, each participant identified as an individual entity or
company has a single vote. Decisions are made by consensus and will
give the possibility to respect the process that the Atom group has
been able to achieve. Participation in this regard is open to both
W3C Members and Invited Experts from the community.
This gives a large amount of power to the chosen chair; there may be
people who feel excluded.
If the charter was written in the way stated above you are correct in
that it gives additional power to the chair. The chair (and possible
co-chair) work with the team contact. Good chairs and good team
contacts however try and make sure people aren't excluded. :)
Working Group membership is not an open door; you must present
credentials and have those reviewed by both the chair and the Team
contact. Then you can come on in. These processes are in place to help
assure accountability, productivity and ensure Royalty Free licensing.
There are hurdles. But these hurdles are relatively small for the
accrued benefits.
Even if that can be avoided, the make-up of the Atom community leads
me to believe that there will be more Invited Experts than
representatives of W3C Members on the WG. Would this be acceptable,
from an AC standpoint? In particular, it would be damaging to all
concerned if we stalled this effort, only to find out that the AC was
not amenable to having what amounts to a non-Member WG formed. Even
worse, serious problems could result if the WG came to consensus, but
the AC was not happy with that result. Would the Director be willing
to prioritise the WG over the AC's advice in such a situation?
There are several W3C Groups where the make up includes many Invited
Experts (several groups in WAI immediately come to mind). So, this
group would not be alone in this regard. Further, a quick scan of the
Atom participants and it strikes me there are many individuals who
already work for W3C organizations so this actually helps :). As for
the what the director might do in such a situation as you suggest, I
don't speak for the director. If this is important question to have
answered I'll talk with him and get back with you.
Regarding consensus: although I believe they are very helpful in most
cases, the W3C's more strict requirements for consensus may turn out
to be a disadvantage in the case of Atom. Because syndication has
been a contentious topic for some time, and because there are several
potential avenues for its development, rough consensus and running
code is -- on the face of it -- a more reasonable approach. Can you
explain more fully how the consensus process at the W3C would result
in a better result, in this particular instance?
I'm a firm believer in the IETF's credo 'rough consensus and working
code', its had to argue with this to get things up and running. I
think Atom is at that place and frankly ready to move on to start
nailing down the specifics and tighten up the working code. For this I
find a process for consensus quite helpful. The social change however
will take work.
I'd expect, however, that there would be an additional responsibility
on the chairs and staff contact to define some additional guidelines
for good standings in this case of a group with several IE's. I'll
look into this in some of the WAI groups to see if they have already
done this.
Finally, one of the reasons that the IETF seemed like the appropriate
choice was the fact that it's widely regarded as neutral. Some, both
inside and outside of the Atom community, perceive the W3C has having
a vested interest in the introduction of RDF and/or a relationship to
RSS 1.0 (of which you were an author). Whether or not this is true,
this perception may make place a cloud over the formation and product
of the WG. What steps would you take to dispel this?
I'm a firm believer of technologies succeeding or failing on their
merit. We all have different background and experiences in building
applications and working on various specs to help make our jobs
easier. The scope of the charter is a handy tool for defining some
bounding boxes on the technologies that are on the table for
consideration.
Yes, I do have a vested interested in RDF and in applications (RSS1.0)
no doubt about it. But I'm only one person and have one voice (and if
I don't join the working group, I don't even have that :). For me
these technologies are valuable because they helped solve various
interoperability problems I worked on for a long time and now see on a
daily basis. If people don't have data integration requirements they
don't need to be using data models to facilitate data integration.
The group decides. This is pro / con aspects of consensus.
- W3C Patent Policy: Royalty Free licensing
The process around working groups participation helps ensure
accountability and encourage Royalty Free licensing of the
technology. RF licensing in particular is an issue we've heard is
important to the syndication community. More information about this
policy is available at:
As you know, the W3C Patent Policy only provides for RF licensing by
Working Group Members. Such an end can be achieved in the IETF as
well, if the WG adopts a policy of only accepting unencumbered
contributions. It is true that doing this work in the W3C will compel
non-participating Members to disclose any claims they may have, but
I'm not convinced that this would be a sizeable benefit. Am I missing
something? This is IP, so I'm sure I am, but I don't believe there's
any inherent weakness in the IETF process WRT IPR.
I don't know enough about the IETF's IPR process to comment. I do know
that having been burned in the past, I really appreciate the process
W3C has put in place.
- I18n, Accessibility, Device Independence Support and Coordination
The Atom group will benefit from the expertise of these groups
which in turn will help ensure wide deployment regardless of
device, language, or ability. Further we expect the resolution of
any coordination issues arising from these groups will be resolved
more quickly at the W3C.
- XHTML Cooperation
It is important to understand the relationship between the Atom
API and the Atom document format. Specifically, we are concerned to
understand how these might evolve (independently or in-step) and
whether the API can be used with RDF formats such as RSS1, or W3C
hypertext formats (e.g. XHTML, or mixed-namespace content). Recent
W3C work (pre-draft at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/02/xhtml-rdf)
on XHTML2 and RDF is combining RDF's metadata approach with XHTML
document syntax, allowing paragraphs of text to be tagged with
information about their topic, source, author etc. We suspect
further discussions (perhaps a Workshop) are needed to fully
understand how the evolution of XHTML-based approaches relate to
Atom and blog-oriented systems. Since XHTML with embedded metadata
can be used to directly encode syndicated content, we believe the
interdependencies between the Atom API and Atom document format
deserve some attention, both in chartering the work (whether at W3C
or IETF) and as the work proceeds.
We believe the cooperation benefits to be great, and the
coordination cost will be addressed more quickly if this work
happens at W3C.
- XML and RDF experience
W3C has years of expertise in definition of content format
language and model description. XML serialization and RDF model are
areas of expertise at the W3C. Though when it comes to a content
model, the organization is pretty agnostic (CSS, XML, RDF for
example are different models). The Atom group is the one defining
its content model and syntax.
Conversely, Atom would benefit from direct liaisons with these
and other W3C Working Groups to resolve potential conflicts and
influence future specifications.
I can't speak for the Atom community, but I've heard a number of
reservations about the complexity inherent in the XHTML
specifications as well as Semantic Web. While I personally believe
that these technologies have a lot to offer Atom, the community
hasn't achieved consensus about adopting them, and I don't believe
that the choice should be made for them by fiat. Would a W3C charter
include mandated relationships with these groups, or particular
requirements for their deliverables?
If the Atom community decided it wanted to go to W3C, I expect the
charter would to help identify scope, related technologies and
relationships to other working groups that would be advantageous to
coordinate with. In a group like this, I'd suggest there would be
strong coordination points with QA, WAI and I18N. But if your worried
about 'you must only use RDF', this is not the case. (If the group
decided it like the RDF Model, but not the serialization for example,
I'd imagine something like GRDDL
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/NOTE-grddl-20040413/ would be discussed.)
There is a lot a good work that is currently underway in XHTML and
Semantic Web. I too believe these technologies have a lot to offer
Atom and its one of the reasons why I think better coordination with
these groups makes sense and benefits all.
Also, I note that the IETF and W3C have had several successful
interactions in the past. What, in particular, is the disadvantage of
pursuing these liaison relationships from the IETF, rather than
within the W3C? Superficially, it seems that the only reason they'd
need to be deep enough to require close co-ordination by the Team is
if there were requirements placed upon the WG by them.
This is certainly an option and one that if the Atom community thinks
is a good one we could collectively pursue. My experience with
working on join organizational efforts in the past, however, (note:
this was not IETF and W3C) seemed to be the case where we took on the
overhead of both, but didn't get the benefits of either. Feedback
from individuals that have participated in both in the past would be
welcome here.
- QA support
We have noticed that the Atom community already has a lot of early
implementation and that you have started a testing effort which is
already impressive. In the context of W3C, this will accelerate the
advancement of the Atom spec along the W3C Recommendation track.
It's great to see that a technology is already so mature with a
well-built quality process.
Would this take the form of W3C Team members contributing to test
cases and/or running code? How much of a Team Member's time would be
devoted to such a WG? Having professional staff would a substantial
advantage.
I could imagine it might involve W3C Team members, and/or it might
involve getting additional QA individuals from other W3C members who
have shown interest in this work to participate. It seems to me the
later being the best option.
While we recognize the IETF submission, we'd like to hear from
others within the Atom community regarding the above points, and
more specifically, their requirements and objectives regarding
taking this to a standards organization. We'd support proposing a
W3C Working Group in this area, provided there is support from the
larger Atom community regarding the points mentioned above and that
agreement about work areas can be reached with the IETF.
Another concern that I have is the W3C policy of doing substantial
technical work in face-to-face meetings. While I agree that this is
very productive, it may be too much of a burden for so many Invited
Experts, especially considering the W3C's requirement that such
meetings be distributed across the globe. I, for example, would
likely be participating as an Invited Expert, and would not be able
to travel, except when my work plans happen to coincide. The IETF's
policy of doing substantial technical work on the mailing list, and
not requiring participation in plenary sessions, seems like a better
fit.
I don't believe there is a *policy* for doing substantial technical
work in face-to-face meetings but rather a by-product of being
face-to-face. How the group works is stipulated in the charter.
Weekly teleconferences and active mailing lists, plus IRC, wiki, etc.
are all tools. The key is to balance the communication tools with the
community to be the most effective. Some do best f2f, some prefer
more asynchronous communication.
Because of the issues mentioned above, my perception at this time is
that it's more natural to have an IETF WG with liaisons to the
appropriate W3C WGs. Would this be workable for the W3C?
Absolutely. If the Atom community believes thats the best fit in the
end. I think its important to understand the benefits and costs
associated with this however.
--
eric miller http://www.w3.org/people/em/
semantic web activity lead http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
w3c world wide web consortium http://www.w3.org/